haiku - evening

darkening sky -
invisible swifts
shriek.


Evening for One Deep Breath.

I've posted another evening haiku with a review on my Alter Ego blog.

Diary from Reused Materials

I'm making myself a diary for next year and given that the Inspire Me Thursday topic this week is Diary, I thought I would post a picture of the diary as it is now. The covers are made from re-used corporate folders. The lettering and numbering on the front is cut out from magazines. The paper inside is reused out of date office headed paper. The diary is held together by an old shoelace.

Walking and Marking - A Retrospective, Richard Long

Richard Long's work is fascinating. This exhibition at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh brings together a wide range of his work from the 1960s onward. His work is concerned with human relationships with the natural world through walking and simple mark making. A series of work here consists of paper that has been dipped in river mud and then hung, allowing gravity to create patterns in the mud. The results looks like aerial photos of patterns of river tributaries and although they are all very similar, the small differences point up the small details that make for uniqueness in the natural world. Another series uses found items - such as driftwood, Berber tent pegs and scrap metal - as canvases for simple finger paintings. The finger paintings and the site specific artworks aloong the rountes of walks Long hasmade over the years, point to the human need to constantly leave our mark on everything/everywhere. It's a wonderfully inspiring and thought provoking exhibition, if a little repetitive after a while.


Richard Long: Walking and Marking, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
until 21 October 2007. £6/£4.

Zen and the Art of .......

I've just re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, a book I first read and loved 15 or so years ago when I lived in Malawi. The volunteers over there had a habit of sharing books and leaving them in each others bookcases as we visited each other - a bit like an early form of Bookcrossing. This was one of the books I most enjoyed while I was over there and it took me all these years to find another copy so I could enjoy it again! It's a wonderful book for so many reasons. It really makes the reader think, encouraging us to observe nature and life in general more closely, encouraging an attitude of serenity, and a positive approach to problem solving. It meditates on family relationships, mental well-being, the history of philosophy (with specific reference to dualism), the purpose of education, aesthetics and makes us look at our value systems and judgement making processes. It's also very readable and often entertaining. Even though I know nothing about motorcycles, I really enjoy the motorcycle in this book being used as a practical application of Zen thinking and philosophy.


Zen and the Art of Creating: As I've been working on painting some boxes while I've been reading this book, I've noticed the Zen like state of mind that painting creates in me. Check out this post on Lunar Musings for a wonderful description of this state of creating.


Zen and the Art of Kimono Recycling - a wonderful post about the philosophy of recycling and the Aesthetics of the Handmade on True Stitches.

My Poetry Featured on Other Blogs

I'm delighted that Deborah of Climate of Our Future has chosen to highlight my poem A Riverscape today on her blog. Climate of the Future is the originator of the Blogging for Positive Global Change Award.

Edited to add: Garden Girl has also chosen to feature the same poem A Riverscape on her blog! I'm happy to share my poetry in this way, just let me know that you're doing it, make sure you publish it with my name attached and make a link back to this blog!

Festival of the Trees

This months Festival of the Trees is now up at Via Negativa. Why not pop over and browse! It includes Sue Turner's poem Echoes from Tomorrow as posted in Bolts of Silk.

The Good Neighbour by John Burnside

This is a wonderful poetry collection! The Good Neighbour explores relationships between humans and between us and nature, with great insight and a wonderful understanding of the workings of language. The poems are populated by shapeshifting creatures, angels and unidentified beings with:

two spurs of cartilage above

the shoulder blades; not wings,
or not quite wings,
but something like a memory of flight

locked in a chamber of bone

(from Annunciation with Zero Point Field)

and are we all like that if only we would recognise it? Life as a whole here is pervaded by:

that locked sense of robin's egg blue
at the back of a life
that never quite lost its place
in the given script
but wanted, more than anything, to rise
and go out in the dark, to where the owls
were shifting aside, unlocked from the visible world,
and the rain in the trees
was a room at the end of the mind
where what we love goes on, uninterrupted.

(from By Herodsfoot)

This extract speaks to me incredibly powerfully, though I can't articulate why. That is part of the appeal in most of these poems, they capture some aspect of life that you instinctively feel is undefinable, as I read the words I'm thinking 'that is so real' but still wouldn't be able to say what it is.

This is a collection I will read over and over, the poetry is so beautiful and insightful. In fact John Burnside os one of my favourite poets currently writing in Scotland, though in some other of his collections his work imbues nature with too much darkness and the novel of his I read was too disturbing for me to be able to finish! If you only read one book by John Burnside make it The Good Neighbour.